A lot of words about industrial design where it clearly doesn't matter to the end users. The appeal of these is choosing components. Those who do care are welcome to pay more for it. I prefer plain to gaudy any day anyway. Reply

I second that. More specifically, "overwhelming blackness" actually sounds good to me. When I sit in a darkened room staring at my Notebook-Screen, chances are I do not want to see anything except the screen itself. Either I am watching a movie on it, or I am playing some deeply immersing game, but in any way having a colored dragon in my field of view won't usually help the experience.Reply

Upgrade to unlock kinda deal (on a better day I'd call it scam). Cheaper windows drops the price a bit but makes some of the memory you paid for inaccessible, pay extra to ms for upgrade to get it all working without hurting the margins of the laptop manufacturer.Reply

Seems like the notebook I want. Looking at several Clevo resellers for the P177SM and some are getting $50 off $1350+. Lowest prices are from Pro-Star, LPC-Digital, and PowerNotebooks. Mythologic sells it the most expensive, followed by Eurocom. I know the Alienware 17 and Razer Blade Pro cost more, but the Clevo P177SM seem to have more options available.Reply

You have to make sure to compare similar configurations, though. Pro-Star and several others don't include the OS by default, for example, so that's at least $80. Mythlogic and Eurocom do LCD calibration for "free", which is worth at least $25 I'd say. Then look at default warranties and configuration options and go from there.

I'd suggest an i7-3800MQ, GTX 780M, 2x8GB RAM, and a 240/256GB mSATA drive with 1TB HDD as a good baseline. Then toss in Windows 8 64-bit, 802.11ac, and upgrade the thermal compound just for kicks and you end up with the following prices:

I think that's most of the major resellers of Clevo notebooks in the US, and you can see that outside of Maingear and Origin, pricing falls around $2300-$2400. A couple places offer cash discounts, others offer additional customization options, etc. Looking at the configurators, I'm still partial to Mythlogic, simply because they offer 512GB mSATA drives and a few other nice extras. AVADirect is the only other place with 512GB mSATA, but I've never liked that their site requires you to click "update price", plus they don't pre-calibrate the LCD.

Anyway, it pays to shop around as always when purchasing something in this price range. Find the options you want, compare pricing, and if you have any additional knowledge of the support and customer service take that into account.Reply

I'm not a person willing to spend with bells and whistles, especially when it comes to the holidays like Black Friday and Christmas. That is reserved for my desktop PC. I know some resellers don't have the OS and installing drivers will be slow for a Clevo notebook. It's nice for some people who can afford those options, but in a few years they'll be obsolete due to new CPU and GPU (like Broadwell and Haswell refresh).Reply

mSATA is simply a nice way to get additional storage. Start with a large mSATA, and then adding 2.5" HDD, SSD, or SSHD is simply down the road. Finding reasonably priced retail mSATA is a bit trickier and with M.2 coming the future supply may be limited. Of course, technically mSATA drives are usually a bit slower than regular SATA, as they have fewer packages to work with so parallelism isn't quite as high. Not really a huge problem in my book, but if you need maximum SSD speeds then 2.5" drives are still a bit faster.Reply

Vivek, do you have any knowledge about why external graphics never made it to the world of laptops with the exception of low-powered solutions utilising Cardbus, ExpressCard or USB? With such a silly amount of different form-factors and often sky-high price-points I have a hard time understanding why no one have bothered with the concept. Especially since so many laptops are sold as "gaming laptops". Is it because of technical reasons? Since it seems quite easy creating a PCI-E 1x lane (as in ExpressCard) why not try scaling it it further?Reply

This is a question I would really like to see explored. My guess is that moving the gpu outside the chassis doesn't decrease weight and increase battery life enough to make a gaming laptop "mobile" when undocked from gpu.While I like about the concept is the idea that I could use normal gpu's (780 vs 780m), and that it would come in a box like the power brick, which I could open and upgrade as needed.Reply

Thunderbolt is barely three years old (and have seen very slow actual adoption), and the products you spoke about is also quite expensive, in the $400-$500 range excluding the card itself. Compare this to the common docking station which can be found in the $200 range, and this includes the "OEM markup", i.e. why a new OEM battery cost $150 while it can be found online from a third-party source for a third of the cost. A desktop GPU in the $200 range would do very well compared to also a high-end mobile GPU since power and cooling would be much less of an issue. Oh well, it's just speculation. Maybe mobility is worth more than price/absolute power for a gamer on the go.Reply

After been seen some reviews of laptops I begin to think that it is only possible to have 16:9 displays for standard windows pc´s and 16:10 displays for osx. Is this correct?I would love to have a windows pc with 16:11 or at least 16:10.Reply

Panasonic is selling their Toughbook with 16:10 screens. It doesn't seem to magically make them a big player in the notebook market. I assume, the majority of buyers don't really care. I used to, when we lost 4:3, but now I got used to it and can live with 16:9 without really feeling any drawbacks.Reply

" The layout was decent, as well, though I’m really struggling to understand why some companies are moving the Fn key to the right side of the spacebar. It’s the wrong side of the keyboard, guys. In day to day use, it just feels unnatural. "

If by "wrong", you mean "right", then sure. Disrupting the normal left-hand side Ctrl-Super-Alt cluster with another key is a cardinal sin. I'm glad that Clevo avoided it with this keyboard.Reply

I'm with Vivek and totally disagree with your opinion. It frustrated me on the P157SM as well, but of course some of it is simply "old habits". But not all -- try doing Home/End with the Fn key on the right and you have two options:

1) Press Fn with the thumb and stretch your hand to hit PgUp/PgDn with a finger (pinky or ring seems most natural to me, and neither is really ideal)2) Move your left hand over to press Fn and then press PgUp/PgDn with your right hand.

Something else is that the placement of Fn to the right of the space bar has shifted the space over to the left. On a standard keyboard, space stretches from the C key to the comma; on the Clevo keyboard it's off center and stretches from X to M. It's not the end of the world, but I suspect there are going to be a majority of people out there that prefer Fn on the left side.Reply

As a touch-typist who makes frequent use of the alt-key, I prefer an alt-key that overlaps the 'c' key. The position on the clevo keyboards, to the left of the 'x' key, brings back painful memories from when I used such a keyboard. Trying to reach it with either the left pinky or left thumb while the rest of the fingers are over the home keys causes some twisting strain after just a few hours. (I imagine such keyboards are designed by someone who has an extra finger coming out of the front of their palm. I suppose one could glue a small foam key extender to the top of the alt key, then you could press it with the palm side of your knuckles or something, but it might be hard to type another key at the same time with the same hand, and it would be hard to close the screen. :)Reply

I love it when they put (and make you pay for) a super fast CPU but don't put enough cooling in it so it gets beaten by a competitor's much cheaper system. That's why a lot of times it makes more sense to buy a notebook for its cooling system and not its CPU/GPU. Reply

Most of the instances where the Eurocom numbers are slower than the Mythlogic results are likely due to drivers. Vivek tested this a few weeks ago and there were some delays in getting it finalized and posted, so I think he may have used 311.27 NVIDIA drivers as opposed to 326.xx. The laptops have all gone back now, so unless he noted this I don't even know for sure what BIOS, drivers, etc. he used.Reply

BIOS/firmware might affect performance in CPU, and also I don't know for sure if Vivek remembered to test under the High Performance profile, which can also cause a drop (i.e. if you use Balanced).Reply

Dustin did the gaming benchmarks, so I'm pretty sure they were done correctly. He was also the one who tested the GT70. The older drivers are a definite possibility though, as is testing variation. Reply

Interesting review of interesting machine but personally I miss a paragraph about heat and noise. Pretty crucial bit specially since in last few gaming laptops reviews ventilation and noise emission seemd like a deal breakers. Could you please share how did x5 did in that department?Reply